Evaluation of 3D Kinematic Model of the Spine for Ergonomic Analysis

Optoelectronic devices for movement analysis allow for the functional evaluation of motor abilities of the human body both healthy and pathological. Our group has developed a specific protocol for the lumbar spine obtaining promising results also in clinical applications. However the main critical issue in these methods is the skin motion artifacts that could affect measures: In fact preliminary experiments show two sources of error in the biomechanical model identification needed for the angle computation during flexion movements: a) markers related to the spinous processes shift their positions with respect to the correspondent vertebra and b) lumbar back muscles influence the position of markers correspondent to the transverse process of the vertebra. This study aims at preliminary evaluating these errors through an innovative protocol based on a joint MRI and optoelectronic analysis.